


The True Memoirs of Anthony Blunt

by Deense



Category: Cambridge Spies
Genre: Gen, Memoirs, Spies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deense/pseuds/Deense
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year after Guy's death, Anthony remembers his friend - and their folly - as best he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The True Memoirs of Anthony Blunt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slowascent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slowascent/gifts).



> Inspired by slowascent's Yuletide Letter and her love of the seven deadly sins, especially the sin of pride.

_August 30th, 1964_

Guy went mad a bit, after Julian died. Perhaps I should have seen it then. It was the sort of madness that was too easy to dismiss, and it might have been that I wanted to dismiss it. We four friends had spent many years making excuses for one another, but I had known Guy the longest and excused the most. Friends since the beginning, I suppose I found it harder than most to admit he might be going so terribly wrong. He'd always had his excesses, little foibles and quirks. It is how things begin, isn't it? With Guy it was always matter of degrees, each action seems less harsh in the light of what came before. I wanted to believe that he wasn't off the rails, that it was simply more of his usual. More fool myself, and that is something not easily admitted.

He'd always been a bit madcap, hadn't he? We were so different, he and I, for all that our lives and upbringings had been so similar. It was likely what drew us together, at least it was why I noticed him at Cambridge. When you moved in the same circles as Guy, it was hard not to notice him. Loud and flamboyant, the sort to speak his mind - no, not speak it, for the word speak implies some sort of decorum. Guy shouted it from rooftops and pulpits. Discretion was not his friend. Whereas things in my life were so careful and controlled, compartmentalised, Jackie said the same thing to me so many years later. That I had boxes and found it all too easy to simply shut something away. Shouldn't I have? My compartmentalisation kept us safe, so many times. When Guy went off on his tangents - even when we were both Apostles - I was the one that stood sure and true. I was the one that remained calm when so many simply reacted and acted. The mark of an English gentleman, that deep-rooted stoicism, wasn't it? I epitomised that very thing and always had. I couldn't be any other way. Even when Guy told others he was a friend of Stalin whilst drunk at parties, I would be the one smiling benignly at Guy's little joke. I was always able to pretend it was a joke, but guy never was. He always felt things so strongly. He threw himself into all of it, holding nothing of himself back. I warned him of the danger of it, but Guy was never the sort to listen to such advice.

Julian was the first warning, or he should have been. He'd almost gone to him, after that party we were at. Raining. It was already raining Julian had said, the crowd having gone quiet in that convenient way that it did. Inconvenient, actually, where Julian was concerned. That night Guy had been drunker than most nights. An accomplishment when one thinks about it seriously. He'd been so determined to leave the house, to find Julian. To explain to him privately that we hadn't changed. That we were working for Moscow and our rejection of socialism was part of the cover.

I stopped him. I was the one that wouldn't let him go. Perhaps I was the one that made it so hard for Guy when Julian died. Had I let him go that night... There's little time for regret in our lives, if any. I refuse to doubt my decisions then. At the time they were the right ones. Guy couldn't have let Julian know any more than we could have let anyone know. It was the point of it, wasn't it? Distancing ourselves from the movement in order to have more use.

It wasn't a friendship without troubles, even when we were at Cambridge. Guy was brilliant, and if I were utterly and brutally honest, I'd say he was smarter than I was. Yet he squandered it shamefully throwing away a brilliance in a way that always bothered me. There was so much he could have done. There was no doubt he'd have been that much more valuable an asset had he not drank and caroused so. It wasn't like anyone could have altered that. When we were still in school it was the norm, just a bit of boys being boys. Once we had graduated, well, there was never any stopping Guy, nor changing Guy.

I realise now I couldn't have. I never thought it at the time, I thought I had him under control. Yes, he said things no one should, especially one in our position. Guy would get drunk and say the most obscene things. Few ever paid them any mind. He was known as a bit of a drinker and if he declared himself a spy at a party, who would think his words the truth?

Should I have noticed it then? I told myself there was nothing to notice. Guy would be Guy, I excused it over and over, always taking note but doing little. I would say a word here and there, nothing more than suggestions or mild admonishments. They were laughed off. Why wouldn't they be laughed off? I never could have seriously admonished Guy and somehow he knew that.. Too many things we laughed off and brushed away. Pride is such a funny thing, isn't it? Not that I would have called my perceived control of Guy pride, I still have issues with referring to it as such. It seemed so reasonable then. We were friends, friends before anything else, before everything else. Shouldn't a man be capable of keeping an eye on his friends, be capable of keeping them in line? A better friend might have seen that it wasn't the simple thing I told myself it was/ Frankly, Guy was out of control long before I cared to admit it.

So many at school knew what we were, even if I'd never been as open as he was. I refer to the communism, that is, not the homosexuality -- though I am sure many knew that as well, such an ill-kept secret as it was in those days. There was no shame in being a communist, not as a student. Being an anti-fascist was a point of pride for many, and later in life it was seen as a sort of undergraduate rash. It was an ailment that one had the good sense to recover from. We were Apostles the, an informal fellowship of students who gathered for many reasons. Many of us homosexuals, all of us anti-fascists, that sort of movement was nearly expected when we were students. Just as it was expected we would move on from it after college to join the establishment. Only, we never did recover from it, we only seemed to. It was all part of the master plan. One couldn't be an effective spy if one was known to have socialist tendencies. It was logical, sensible, the most useful thing that we could have done: distance ourselves from our own pasts. But it hurt Guy deeply, having to pretend that he'd rejected Communism, especially to Julian.

I would swear it all changed when Julian died. I'd rather not use the word died, it sounds so innocuous, as if he were elderly and passed on in his sleep. Julian was killed, yet another death at the hands of those same fascists we all hated. There were times that it seemed Julian had the simpler and easier task. There was elegance in our roles – an excitement - that didn't exist in Julian's open devotion to the cause. I told myself that. We all did, I'm sure, that we were fighting the longer fight, the more important one. What would have changed for us if we could have done what he did? If we could have been open in our fight against the forces that tried to devour Europe?

He knew, you know. He knew that Julian and I had been together. I knew of his affection for Julian but it didn't stop me. Guy never saw how they would have been the end of each other, fanned flames burning too quickly. Their passion, however different and sometimes misguided, would have been the end of them both. That isn't to say there was anything noble about my affair with Julian. I was fond of him, yes, but never in love. Love was such a dangerous thing. As dangerous as happiness, moreso when they came together. The four of us - any spies really - couldn't afford such luxuries, not and perform our chosen task and be safe.

I should have seen it. I should have seen it after Julian's death but I wouldn't allow myself to. Pride, hubris, call it what you will. Perhaps even something so much simpler: the loyalty of four friends to one another. Beyond any cause or any devotion, those friends were the things that I had to keep safe and that I held to be most important. Do you know I believed it? I believed that I, Anthony Blunt, could keep us safe. I thought that I could protect each of us against the world. What an utter fool I was. There was nothing and no one that could protect us from ourselves, we were always our own worst enemies. Guy and Donald were both problems, but it was Guy that mattered most to me. Kim and Donald; Guy and myself. It was how things had always been and how they would always be.

I never knew if he was hurt by Jackie's defection, as it might have been called. Jackie wasn't as important to Guy as Julian had been. I always felt that he was more a distraction to Guy, something to keep him occupied when he couldn't be bothered venturing out to one of his less than reputable locales. Perhaps that alone should have warned me away. Once his distraction was gone - once his distraction was mine - he became ever the more on edge. I've said already how brilliant he was. Brilliant and mad -- no, lost is a better word then mad. Guy needed our cause, he needed to believe. Julian, to him, had been an ideal, the personification of a concept and a belief. Not only someone he loved, but his beacon in an otherwise dark world. What Guy felt he should be and how he should be. When Julian was killed it all changed. He clung to the cause, wrapping himself in it as one would a blanket on the coldest of nights.

I should have seen. I should have seen and I should have stopped it, long before I became so tired. There is a part of me that believes, still, this end could have been avoided. If I had acted earlier or made more of an effort that we could have all been safe. Guy deserved more than a warm coat and a sad life lived out away from the country he loved so. I never wrote him once he'd been exiled. The letters might have been intercepted after all. I couldn't have, and maintained my own secrets. Sad that those secrets that in the end were made public. In the end, we were all betrayed. When we became agents at Cambridge, we were such idealists, and we believed. It was exciting. Did I ever say that? There was this whiff of adventure that came with being a spy. It was a life that I could never have imagined otherwise. A life I could never have had otherwise. When did it stop being such an adventure? When did watching over my friends become such a task and a trial? The years took their toll. I would say that it was inevitable, but I am not fond of admitting inevitability. I'm not fond of admitting my own faults, nor am I fond of admitting my own part in our downfall. Yet fond or not, it is there. My hubris led us as much to our downfall as their excess did.

Silly, isn't it? To think that we shared secrets that changed the world, and yet it was the simplest things that affected us. Julian's death. Jackie. Stalin making a pact with Hitler in order to buy himself time. The last... Were it not for Kim and myself, I think we would have lost Guy then. He would have self-destructed or done something truly foolish. He was always on the edge, you realise. When I heard of what he did in Washington, driving drunk, appearing at that dinner at Kim's house, I knew just how far Guy had gone. That he'd lost his belief in some way, and had gone over the edge, seeking his own downfall. Only his self-destruction would pull in those associated with him. It would pull in Donald, Kim and myself.

Or it may have been that he was already gone long before Washington and that even to this day I'm fooling myself. I'm letting that same pride colour my memories. It's a difficult thing see things clearly that are in the past. Our visions are filtered to show the events in the light they find most favourable. In some ways our memories are like paintings. They are creations of our own mind that relates to the world but does not truly reflect it. We see that world in the painting through the filter of the artist with our own perceptions layered atop that. A difficult thing to consider when it's something as personal as our own own past. Am I remembering correctly, interpreting the events the way they occurred? Or have my perceptions shaped my very memories? Do I remember things the way I wish them to be? I can no longer tell.


End file.
